A blow to Jersey's juicy pride

The "Garden State" on our license plates is laughed at. The beauty of the Shore doesn't enter the national psyche. Instead, America clings to the vision of New Jersey as nothing more than the smelliest portion of the Turnpike, flanked by a nightmare landscape of power lines, oil tanks and flaming smokestacks.
The Jersey tomato has always provided a humble but succulent rebuttal to such ignorance. The tomato is to the Garden State what the peach is to Georgia, the orange to Florida. A source of pride, each year's crop is eagerly awaited by gardeners and diners alike.
So the disappointment was keen when Rutgers University's Snyder Research and Extension Farm in Hunterdon County was forced to cancel the 17th annual Great Tomato Tasting. A hailstorm earlier this month tore through the farm's fields, the golf-ball-size hailstones slicing like shrapnel through 75 to 85 percent of the more than 80 varieties that had ripened on the vines.

Tomato aficionados have been making condolence calls to the farm. They will have to wait until next year for the chance to gather and share the experience of tasting variety after variety, arguing the merits of heirloom strains over hybrids and whether it is better to stake their favorite plant or propagate it in a wire mesh cage.
Fortunately, Mother Nature was fickle as well as harsh. The hailstorm was a rifle shot, not a shotgun blast. The massacre didn't extend much beyond the Snyder Farm.
Other tomato farms around the state are producing one of the best harvest in years, the Agriculture Department says. Festival or not, August is still a time to celebrate New Jersey's most famous crop.